


they say an end can be a start

by uro_boros



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 09:31:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uro_boros/pseuds/uro_boros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“But I recognize the signs of someone who’s running away from something.”</p><p>Eren’s head tilts on his shoulder, craning back to look at Levi. “Why?” he says, the line of his mouth dark and unamused. “You running from something?”</p><p>(or the one where Eren's homeless and Levi's neurotic. They make it work)</p>
            </blockquote>





	they say an end can be a start

When Levi was twenty-five, he packed a duffle bag full of clothes, closed his bank account, and moved from one shitty apartment to another one nearly six hundred miles away. He left behind nothing—fastidious in this task, crawling on his knees for every spare hair that his vacuum didn’t pick up—setting a voice message for anyone who bothered to call his old line. A few did at first, leaving trailing, hesitant messages for him; Petra, the soft-eyed girl from the company he left behind called for nearly six months, once a week like clockwork, her messages clicking over as Levi filled an ashtray in his shitty new apartment listening to them on repeat. They stopped eventually after the months of no replies (her last mentioned a wedding; Levi had marked the date on the desk calendar he kept, neatly tucked away out of sight and out of mind, intending to go—he had bought a suit that was too long in the elbows, too broad in the shoulders, and stood at his threshold with the door swung wide and open and felt everything closing in on him until he had to shut it and smoke a pack of cigarettes to calm the furious thunder of his heart).

The shitty apartment six hundred miles away is equally as shitty as the one he left behind, with blank, white walls. At night, when his chest constricted tight and the repeated tapes of Petra’s recorded voice turned to fuzzy static in the confines of his head, he climbed out onto the fire escape and stared up at a sky too light polluted to show any stars.

It wasn’t always like this, but he isn’t sure what before exactly was.

—-

There’s a homeless kid with ratty gloves gripping his shoulders. “Hey,” the kid’s saying, but Levi’s focus is on the kid’s hands. Touching him.

They’re dirty, something black dug deep under his nails, grime turning tan skin even darker. Something else colorful like paint clings in bright spots on both the kid’s skin and the pilling fabric of his gloves. “Don’t touch me,” Levi hears himself say, from a distance. The kid frowns, but his touch remains.

"Hey," he says again, more firmly. Levi tears himself away with a snarl twisted on his lips, curses spilling out.

"Don’t fucking touch me," he repeats, loud enough that it rattles through him. It’s usually enough for people to back away, murmuring to themselves  _the fuck is wrong with you_. The kid just blinks at him, with big, green eyes, oddly placid, holding both hands up in apology.

"I wouldn’t have to, man, if you had heard me calling for you," the kid pouts. One of the hands in the air is holding a leather wallet. He extends it out to Levi. "You dropped it," he explains, giving Levi a careful smile.

The teeth set in his smile are bright and white, perfectly straight. Levi’s eyes drop from it, to his wallet, to the kid’s dirty as fuck hand holding his wallet, splattered with paint. He looks back to where he had been walking, right past where the kid had apparently set up an impromptu art gallery on the side-walk.  _Five dollars,_  reads a sign next to them.  _Please help,_  it adds after a moment, almost grudgingly.

"Thanks," Levi says slowly after a moment, but doesn’t move to take his wallet. He exhales through his nose. "Do me a favor," he orders the kid, "open up my wallet and take out all the money you find in there. Let me take my cards and shit. The rest is yours, including the wallet itself."

The kid’s smile turns into a frown immediately. “What, no,” he yelps, voice high and indigent in his protest, “you can’t just give me money for nothing. Man, it’s your wallet, if I wanted your money, I would have just taken it.”

"I’m not giving it to you for free," Levi snaps, irritated. "I want your best painting for it."

(he goes home with something a mess of swirling greens and blues that reminds Levi vaguely of the ocean—he’ll toss it, he thinks initially, after he’s out of the kid’s line of sight)

(instead he stops at a store and picks up a frame, hangs it carefully straight on his blank, white wall, the one opposite of his bed)

(he’s able to sleep that night, he finds)

—-

The kid is there every day, now that Levi bothers to notice. He has all the telltale marks of a teenage runaway, signs that Levi knows only because he had been one once himself, in a past that’s mostly been forgotten except for the huge scars it leaves behind in his idiosyncrasies.

Erwin used to use that word to describe his compulsions; it was delicate, and hid the bigger picture, so people could laugh and Levi could pretend like their presence wasn’t itching under his skin. Erwin had been good to him, better than he deserved, really, and he had stayed through the worst of Levi in hopes of being able to see the best. The best had never come, but a pretty girl with bones like a bird had, and Levi had slipped away with the grace of a natural born runner. 

None of the paintings that Levi buys and frames are signed, like the kid’s ashamed of himself and what he’s doing, but he gets a name one day when the kid takes his five dollar bill with familiarity and smiles brightly at him. “You should know my name,” he insists. “It’s Eren.” He doesn’t add a last name, and Levi doesn’t press. He knows better.

Levi’s mouth doesn’t curl around Eren’s name the same way Eren’s does. It’s softer, in some regards, and harsher in others (too tight on the  _r_  and the  _e’s_ are nearly lost), but the kid is all starry-eyes and a red blush staining the tops of his ears. 

He offers his own name in stilted return, and Eren’s smile is softer now.

"I knew it already," he says, "but thank you for telling me."

—-

Winter is cold, and Eren sits on the sidewalk with all his paintings on display. His cardboard sign is damp and sagging, the grudging  _help_  only a faint remnant in the trailing smear of marker it leaves behind. His nose leaves a trailing smear too, this time of snot, and Levi winces when Eren stuffily takes his five.

His hands are dirty, but Levi’s gotten used to them. The snot is new, however, and he bites out a hissing  _don’t touch me_ when Eren’s hand comes too close to his when taking the bill. 

"Sorry," Eren says after a pause. His fingers walk to the edge of the bill and take it there, away from Levi’s hand.

Levi’s heart, painfully constricted in his chest, relaxes, suddenly. He stares at Eren’s hand and his bright nose, and hears himself say in a dull monotone, “Come home with me.”

Eren’s bright smile goes achingly false. “Sorry, mister,” he says in a voice he’s clearly practiced, “you’ll have to try the next corner for that.”

"Not like that," Levi tells him, giving him a searching look, hand still enfolded around the bill. "It’s cold out here. I have a heater and some food. More importantly, I have a fucking shower."

Eren hesitates, and Levi understands this too. Risk assessment, he thinks a bit darkly. 

"You can trust me," Levi adds after a moment. "The only thing weird about my place is that I have all your fucking paintings around it." That and the overwhelming smell of bleach, the lack of personal affects, the fact that Levi’s presence after four months has failed to leave any trace of itself at all, because Levi’s fucking crazy. Eren didn’t need to know those things, though, just that Levi was safe.

"Oh," breathes Eren then, looking at Levi with those big, green eyes. "Okay."

—-

"Wow," Eren had said, the first thing out of his mouth when Levi turned open his door. Stunned, he had stood in the middle of Levi’s tiny living room and taken it all in—there were hanging paintings, and ones propped carefully against the walls in frames ready to be hung, and still more laid out tenderly on Levi’s table and coffee table, any flat surface he could find, really.

Eren stood in the middle of Levi’s meticulously clean living room, absolutely filthy, and all Levi could feel was an odd, fuzzy calm around him, like none of that mattered at all.

"It’s nice," Eren told him, exceedingly earnest, as Levi pushed him towards the shower. He had paused in the daunting white of Levi’s bathroom, looking for the first time a little lost as Levi stood in the doorway and told him what handle did what, before catching his dirty hands around Levi’s wrist.

"I’ll paint you something for in here, too," he had said. 

"Idiot," Levi scoffed. "You’ll void my deposit."

Eren had laughed, bending to run the water a little, in an effort for Levi’s shitty pipes to warm before he stepped under their spray. “That’s okay,” he had told Levi, quietly confident in his assessment and smiling a little. “You wouldn’t mind.”

No, Levi had thought, vaguely surprised with himself. He wouldn’t at all.

—-

What emerged from Levi’s shower was not what had gone into it. Scrubbed clean, Eren’s eye for beauty suddenly made sense. 

Levi feels ugly and small next to him. It’s not a new feeling, Erwin used to inspire the same, so the stinging of it is a little dull and rusted. It doesn’t hurt any less than it ever had, but it’s at least familiar.

"You can stay here," Levi offers, perched awkwardly on the couch in the living room, hands folded over the top of his mug. Eren blinks at him from the small hallway to the bathroom, towel wrapped around his neck, wearing a pair of sweatpants that are too small for him. He bobs his head in a nod, then glances at Levi and back at the bathroom.

"I cleaned it after my shower," Eren says in a bright change of subject. "If you want to look it over. I’d like if you did, actually, I want to make sure I did it right. If I didn’t, tell me and I’ll do it over."

"What?" Levi questions, a little hoarsely. He’s standing anyway, pushing past where Eren stands (clean, reminds a corner of Levi’s mind that never turns off) and trailing the sandalwood scent of Levi’s body-wash. The bathroom behind him is as pristine as when Levi left it.

"If it’s not alright," Eren repeats from a point above his shoulder, each word simple like Levi isn’t unhealthily neurotic, "let me know. I’ll do it again, Levi."

"It’s fine," Levi tells him honestly, startled and charmed, heart aching a little softly. "It’s perfect."

—-

Eren sleeps on the couch and makes breakfast in the morning, spending his afternoon in Levi’s bathroom, painting the walls like he had promised. He lays out old newspapers on the floor before he starts and asks Levi’s input on every color until, exasperated, Levi tosses his hands in the air and yells,  _I’m not the fucking artist, you are, so stop asking me,_ receiving Eren’s laugh as the only reply.

"You’ll have to stay until you finish," Levi says a little testily over a shared dinner. Across the table from him, Eren blushes shyly, biting into his smile. He looks down at the spill of Chinese noodles on his plate, pushing a few forward and back in repeated motion.

"Okay," he agrees quietly. 

"Just clean up after," Levi adds after a moment of consideration. "That should be fucking obvious."

Eren laughs, and there are bits of egg and green onion on his teeth. “No duh,” he says. Under the table, his sock-clad toes brush against Levi’s—he’s worn them all day, slipping on the cold linoleum of the apartment and a vague part of Levi knows that as clean as he keeps everything, it’s still dirty. Filth clings to everything but especially to the bottoms of socks, and Eren’s been painting all day besides. There’s bound to be something. His mind will make something.

He presses his toes against Eren’s once, in quiet acknowledgment, before moving them away. Eren smiles down at his noodles again.

—-

"How’d you end up on the street?" he asks one day, crouching in the doorway of the bathroom, away from the pallet of paints that he eyes with apprehension—the floor is covered though and Eren’s careful, every stroke he makes deliberate and assured, not a drop out of place. He’s speaking more to Eren’s back, since Eren’s facing away from him, but a shoulder rises at his question.

"I dunno," Eren says. "It just happens, you know? There’s something free about it." 

"Bullshit," Levi snorts. "That’s a fucking lie and you know it." Eren tenses, but the hand on the brush is firm and calm in its motion.

"Why does it matter?" he says after a moment. 

It doesn’t, says something in Levi’s head. “It doesn’t,” he echoes it, but tacks on more to it then just that. “But I recognize the signs of someone who’s running away from something.”

Eren’s head tilts on his shoulder, craning back to look at Levi. “Why?” he says, the line of his mouth dark and unamused. “You running from something?”

"Yeah," Levi says quietly. Thinks of Petra’s fuzzy voice on the recorder, the strong, broad expanse of Erwin’s back the last time they fucked. He thinks of fifteen and twenty-five, each decade a crisis. There’s a pack of cigarettes in his dresser that he hasn’t smoked in a week. "But I think I’m ready to stop."

"Oh," says Eren faintly. The mural on the wall is all greens and greys, and there’s something there, Levi thinks. 

"Running’s hard," Levi tells him kindly. Eren shudders at his voice.

"It is."

"Are you ready to stop?"

"…yeah," says Eren after a pause, putting his brush down in the old coffee tin Levi had given to him to wash his brushes in. He turns to face Levi fully now, still seated, back a faint space away from the wet paint on the wall. There’s the distance of the bathroom between them, Levi still crouched in the doorway, and it should divide them somehow. Eren’s space is covered in paint and messy, while Levi’s is blank and clean.

But Eren’s art is on all of his walls now in huge bursts and swirls of colors. There are pieces of it in every tiny corner, on his couch and love-seat, the tops of his bookshelves. Eren’s sitting on newspaper and under that is Levi’s clean floor, preserved carefully by him—Levi’s watched him before, pulling up the paper each day to make sure nothing’s spilled through onto the ground under it, putting new paper down in the mornings before he starts.

Levi stands, his knees cracking, and inches over the threshold of the bathroom door, ready to step forward across it.

Except Eren’s on the movement in a rush, in a scramble of awkward limbs, spilling his brush water as he goes. “Sorry,” he says, breathless, cradling Levi’s waist as he meets Levi there, over the dividing line between them. “I’ll clean it up later,” he says with a laugh caught in his words, and then kisses Levi desperately.

Levi clutches Eren’s messy shirt front a little desperately too, and finds he doesn’t care at all.


End file.
